rdex presentation and performance at
Piksel festival
18-21 November 2010 in Bergen, Norway.
rdex presentation at
Pixelache Helsinki 2010!
Check out the slides including photos of the Kiblix installation online
here at
/pixelache10/.
rdex installation at
Kiblix!
Check out the rdex-server online here at
/kiblix/ now that
the festival is over.

rdex-client is an installation that explores in
an autonomous hyperspace mathematical model, searching for
interesting emergent behaviour (life-alike, alife).

The model is a kind of continuous non-linear cellular automaton,
based on partial differential equations representing chemistry
of two reagents involving reaction and diffusion.

The mathematical equations of the model have four parameters, that
need to be set to concrete values when running the simulation.
rdex-client explores this 4D parameter space at
random.

rdex-client analyses the behaviour that emerges
from the system, moving on to a new set of parameters if it fades
into unchanging uniformity or explodes into erratic numerical
instability. Much more time is spent evolving the cellular
automaton when neither of those alternatives occurs: when it finds
something really quite interesting...

When rdex-client finds interesting behaviour, it
uploads a snapshot to rdex-server along with the
results of a few image analysis algorithms. The most recent
interesting patterns found by rdex-client are
shown at the top of the page.

rdex-server provides an interface to browse this
collection by similarity to a chosen target or focus point. The
target is shown full size on the left of the page, with the most
similar patterns displayed to the right.

The default metric is to choose nearby points in
the input 4D parameter space. The colour metric
compares the resulting images' colour histograms.

The texture metric compares some output pattern
texture features (namely coarseness, contrast, and
directionality for each of U and V). Finally the
segment metric compares the sizes of
contiguous regions in the output pattern.

Reaction-diffusion chemistry has been a rich territory for artistic
vs scientific investigation, from
Roy Williams' 1994
Xmorphia
brought back to life and extended by Robert Munafo (excerpt pictured); through to
Hans H. Diebner's 2009
Ex Omnium Rerum Perturbatio Emergat Forma.